ottertown

For my family, definitely yes. Though it may just be that non-technical people are going to take longer to understand the gravity of technical problems, and I think that's compounded by most people's latent contempt for software / IT people.

My family initially decided Edward Snowden was a traitor and coward for 'fleeing' to Russia. They threw every stale argument at me, from "I have nothing to hide" to "everyone is spying on everyone, what's the big deal?"

They've started to backtrack from these positions. I'm not sure why or how, but I suspect they just needed people they trust (e.g. some columnist in the NY Times) to tell them they're wrong.

Man, I work as a frontend engineer at one of the big tech companies and I understood like 25% of this post.

And that's not meant to be a criticism, I'm just reflecting on my total ignorance of most security vulnerabilities. I know about and having implemented some measures against XSS / CSRF, but it's clear there are dozens of attack approaches I'm not even aware of.

I feel like I have some homework to do.

Seriously?

I know HackerNews can rock the haterade like no other, but why aim that at developers who took months out of their lives to build a tool for the open source community? And why do so with such unhelpful criticisms? And do you think the team that built this had anything but a huge net loss in opportunity cost? $11k is an above average software engineer's monthly take home. This was built in at least a few months with several engineers.

If the UI is laughably bad, surely it should be easy to list out some constructive criticisms rather than disparaging insults? I will offer some:

1. One defense of the default UI is that in bl.ocks.org, most examples are shown with the visualization on top and the code on the bottom. Maybe they were trying to offer a similar experience, but I agree it doesn't make sense as the code will almost always be longer in height than the output it creates. Side by side should be the default view, and the code should be on the left, output on the right.

2. The inability to resize the code view when in side by side mode (clicking on the ying yang), is also frustrating.

3. The home / about / gallery menu in the top left feels incomplete. It needs styling and a proper home. It feels like it was just stitched on.

4. Having the video seems like an okay idea but I think most people are used to in browser editors at this point and don't need a video explanation. The UI should speak for itself in this regard. You could have some instructions commented out in the editor for how to get started, but that's it.

5. Borrow from others: jsbin, codepen, jsfiddle...

Overall, I think this could be a really helpful tool and this is a strong prototype. The UI needs some work but the core functionality works well, and I like that I don't have to rerun the code to see the output.

Um, maybe? There's a whole list of unacceptable types of parties for companies to host.

Greek may have generated less uproar, but that's not the word they chose.

Lots of comments here focusing solely on the beer pong aspect of frat parties. You guys aren't wrong: there's nothing sexist about beer pong.

The use of the word 'frat' really is the difference here. Beer and beer pong are the obvious connotations with frat parties. Scantily clad women, roofies, and rape, are some others, even if those associations are unfair. Why in the world would you associate your company with something like that?

The party itself isn't some egregious, unforgivable mistake, but the fact that while under investigation for gender discrimination, it does something like this, illustrates to me that Twitter is pretty oblivious to the problem.

Can you point me in the right direction? For the life of me I can't find it in the UI.

I really like that you have challenges aimed at frontend developers. Something Hackerrank is sorely missing.

thanks for this. I don't know what I was expecting beyond the jobs board / who is hiring threads. maybe some kind of secret handshake that only ycombinator people know?

You don't have to go that far down the Backbone road to get performance that rivals other frameworks is the point.

All this comes down to is how do you update the DOM when data changes. React nicely packages up that functionality for you, but in a huge dependency and in a fairly opinionated framework.

For a lot of developers, the flexibility of Backbone is worth the incurred cost of having to manually create listeners / render actions for data updates.

Ah so that's what was happening. I was trying to post it yesterday with no luck.

I wonder why the mods would block this link. I'll admit the article seems more intent on telling a sexy story than commenting broadly on the state of Silicon Valley gender issues.

I pretty much agree with this. They created a D3.js treemap and probably even used a standard Colorbrewer blue color scheme, as seen in this d3 example:

http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4063582

Was it terribly uncreative for the other YCombinator company to do the same thing? Yes.

Was it plagiarism, copying, or unethical? No way. You did not invent the treemap nor a strong blue on light blue color scheme. Your UX is not unique enough to claim design infringement here.

Lastly, your TOS is probably the most alarming part of this story. You should not be so afraid of competition that you attempt to prohibit 'competitors' from using your product.

The dislike probably is directed mostly at the external recruiters, but a lot of this stuff applies to them as well.

I've only had two bad recruiter experiences, one with an internal and one with an external. The former lured me in with a 'big equity' role that turned out to be junior developer. The latter was a recruiting contractor for Tesla who told me they were building a new frontend team. When I got on the phone with him it turned out the team had existed for two years, was over 10 people, and was simply refocusing their product.

In both cases, the recruiter was dishonest about the position. So what I've learned is not to take next steps until I have much clearer details on the role.

External recruiters tend to be way more vague on details, so I can understand the annoyance of having to reply with "tell me what you're actually trying to sell me on." But I find that sending a direct reply like that tends to be pretty effective at eliciting details.

There seems to be in this thread (and on HN in general) a lack of empathy for the recruiter.

Here's my perspective on (internal) recruiters as someone who sits next to them at an office:

1. Recruiters tend to be really nice people.

2. All day long they talk about prospects with other recruiters almost as if they were talking about potential romantic partners. Except replace any discussion of your physical characteristics with your intellectual / linkedin characteristics. It would be weird if it weren't their job.

3. If a recruiter sends you an InMail, if you reply back (no matter what the response) it helps them as each unanswered InMail costs them money (they don't get to reuse it).

4. Their job is really hard (especially for finding developers), and they are under a ton of pressure, especially when a company is growing, to build head count. Investors really value head count growth heading into a Series B / Series C round of funding.

So, consequently, I would recommend that devs cut recruiters some slack. Be grateful we live in a time where our greatest annoyance is someone contacting us with a job opportunity.

It wasn't always like this and it probably won't be forever.

I grew up watching Jon Stewart and occasionally Colbert. I always thought it was interesting how Jon Stewart would defend against his critics by saying something along the lines of "my show is preceded by puppet prank callers (crank yankers), this is a comedy show first and foremost."

That was his defense against people saying he was contributing to news imbalance or accusing him of not doing anything useful to alleviate the problems of biased journalism. He took a hard line (and still does I think) that he was a comic and was not responsible for anything beyond that.

I remember once he had a segment about a 9/11 first responders bill (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM6cvbjZmQE), which may have reversed the course of that bill for the better (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/business/media/27stewart.h...).

John Oliver seems to have grasped the power of that particular segment and has, in my opinion, drastically improved the form of the political satire. It will be interesting to see how his perceived influence will affect next season.

This is an ambitious project but I wonder if there'll be a market for it even if the product is well executed.

1) It seems like you'll need to have some understanding of how web applications work to use the UI, and if that's the case you probably already know how to do trivial things quickly like creating submission forms.

2) Related to 2), browsers and the JS community are getting pretty good at doing things like components and modularity. Building apps should continue to get easier for developers.

3) It could work well for apps whose scope is contained in your feature scope, but when I need to do anything custom outside that scope I'll be out of luck.

Basically it comes down to whether the time that cloudboost saves me on web dev is going to be worth the extent of restriction on product. The lower that extent, the more it's worth it. Good luck to you guys.

was this link not meant for the public? getting a 404 now.

mirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20140916215429/https://www.gsaadv...

I really like this but I wish the documentation included recommended DOM structure / css styles... it's not as plug and play as the docs suggest

tried using this before (or one similar to it).

the reason I still have to use python is for generating different clusters of objects with distinct attributes (e.g. to create a non-normal distribution within objects and attributes). this system lets you create random clusters of objects without being able to control the distribution because you can't predefine variables.

unless of course, I'm missing some key feature?

as a former, disenfranchised education technologist, comments like this: “If this is still an ‘emerging concept,’ why are we implementing it?” are all too familiar.

teachers and school administrators are fearful of tech solutions because so many of them have been awful and have completely ignored the needs of the classroom. but that means potentially worthwhile products go unimplemented.

if you're going to do a startup, I highly recommend not doing so in the education space.